1. Field of the Disclosure
The present invention relates to custom designed integrated circuits. More specifically, the present invention relates to a system and method for custom designing an integrated circuit that executes software in a manner that is consistent with the speed of hardware circuitry.
2. Background Information
In general, there are two types of custom designed integrated circuits. The first is the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). These chips are, quite literally, custom designed hardware circuits. They are extremely fast and utilize relatively low power.
A drawback is that the design process incurs enormous non-recurring engineering costs. Millions of dollars need to be expended before the first chip is even sold. The chip is also dedicated to its design purpose, and cannot be reconfigured for other uses.
The other primary type of custom designed integrated circuits is the field-programmable gate array (FPGA). FPGAs contain programmable logic components called “logic blocks”, and a hierarchy of reconfigurable interconnects that allow the blocks to be “wired together”—somewhat like many (changeable) logic gates that can be inter-wired in (many) different configurations. Various computer tools are provided whereby a user can custom design a circuit using the tool. The tool will form the interconnections in the FPGA to execute the programmed circuit.
FPGAs have advantages over ASICs in that they have much lower non-recurring engineering costs, and are reconfigurable. However, FPGAs are significantly slower than ASIC chips, consume relatively high amounts of power, and have a high per unit cost.
The market currently does not have a configurable chip that can provide the advantages of both FGPAs and ASIC chips without the corresponding disadvantages.
In general, the design of software based processing has various limits on its processing speed. In contrast, hardware has far faster processing.